There were few visitors to Derbent's sprawling Jewish cemetery in Russian's Muslim-majority Dagestan region on Thursday, but some of those laying flowers on relatives' graves said an anti-Semitic riot four days earlier had left them feeling unsettled.
"Such things upset us a lot," said Zoya Solomonova, who now lives in St Petersburg but recalled growing up in a neighbourhood of Derbent where she said Russians, Jews, Azerbaijanis and others all got along.The riot, at an airport in the regional capital of Makhachkala 66 miles from Derbent, saw hundreds of Dagestanis, mostly young men,and onto the tarmac hunting for Israeli citizens and Jewish people who had just flown in on a flight from Tel Aviv.
With row after row of gravestones engraved with the Star of David or portraits and pictures of the dead, Derbent's Jewish cemetery gives an indication of how large this coastal city's Jewish population once was. An Islamist insurgency which spilled over from neighbouring Chechnya to roil Dagestan in the 2000s and 2010s saw more leave a region that has long been one of Russia's poorest with high rates of unemployment, especially among young men.An ancient walled city straddling a narrow pass between the Caucasus mountains and the Caspian Sea, Derbent still continues to play host to one of the country's oldest Jewish communities though.
Several Jewish leaders in Derbent declined to speak to Reuters about the riot, citing security concerns."The pogrom in Dagestan only serves to underscore a terrible and uncomfortable truth," Shneor Segal, Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi of Azerbaijan, said after the riot.
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